The Physics of Wall Street: a brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable

part of the Met Lab’s most important calculations, head of the effort. 
the Manhattan Project was the single largest scientific endeavor ever 
embarked on: at its height, it employed 130,000 people, and it cost a 
total of $2 billion (about $22 billion in today’s dollars). the country’s 
entire physics community rapidly mobilized for war, with research 
departments at most major universities taking part in some way, and 
with many physicists relocating to the new secret research facility at 
Los Alamos.
Groves had a lot on his plate. But one of the very biggest problems 
involved scaling up production of plutonium from the few milligrams 

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the Met Lab had produced to a level sufficient for the mass production 
of bombs. It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of this challenge. 
Ultimately, sixty thousand people, nearly half of the total staff working 
on the Manhattan Project, would be devoted to plutonium produc-
tion. When Groves took over in September 1942, the Stone and Web-
ster engineering corporation had already been contracted to build a 
large-scale plutonium enrichment plant in Hanford, Washington, but 
compton, who still ran the Met Lab, didn’t think Stone and Webster 
was up to the task. compton voiced his concern, and Groves agreed 
that Stone and Webster didn’t have the right kind of experience for 
the job. But then, where could you find a company capable of taking a 
few milligrams of a brand-new, cutting-edge material and building a 
production facility that could churn out tons of the stuff, fast?
At the end of September 1942, Groves asked du Pont to join the 
project, advising Stone and Webster. two weeks later, du Pont agreed 
to do much more: it took full responsibility for the design, construc-
tion, and operation of the Hanford plant. the proposed strategy? do 
for plutonium precisely what du Pont had done for nylon. from the 
beginning, elmer Bolton, who had led the just-finished nylon project 
as head of the central research unit, and several of his closest associates 
took leadership roles in the plutonium project. And just like nylon, 
the industrialization of plutonium was an enormous success: in a little 
over two years, the nylon team ramped up production of plutonium a 
million-fold.
Implementing the nylon strategy was not a simple task, nor was it 
perfectly smooth. to produce plutonium on a large scale, you need a 
full nuclear reactor, which, in 1942, had never been built (though plans 
were in the works). this meant that, even more than with nylon, new 
technology and basic science were essential to the development of the 
Hanford site, which in turn meant that the physicists at the Met Lab 
felt they had a stake in the project and took du Pont’s role to be “just” 
engineering. they believed that as nuclear scientists, they were work-
ing at the very pinnacle of human knowledge. As far as they were con-
cerned, industrial scientists and engineers were lesser beings. needless 
to say, they did not take well to the new chain of command.
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t h e p h y s i c s o f wa l l s t r e e t

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Swimming Upstream 
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the central problem was that the physicists significantly underes-
timated the role engineers would have to play in constructing the site. 
they argued that du Pont was putting up unnecessary barriers to re-
search by focusing on process and organization. Ironically, this prob-
lem was solved by giving the physicists more power over engineering: 
compton negotiated with du Pont to let the chicago physicists review 
and sign off on the du Pont engineers’ blueprints. But once the physi-
cists saw the sheer scale of the project and began to understand just 
how complex the engineering was going to be, many gained an ap-
preciation of the engineers’ role — and some even got interested in the 
more difficult problems.
Soon, scientists and engineers were engaged in an active collabora-
tion. And just as the culture at du Pont had shifted during the nylon 
project — as the previously firm boundaries between science and engi-
neering began to crumble — the collaboration between physicists and 
engineers at the Hanford site quickly broke down old disciplinary bar-
riers. In building the plutonium facility, du Pont effectively exported 
its research culture to an influential group of theoretical and experi-
mental physicists whose pre- and postwar jobs were at universities, not 
in industry. And the shift in culture survived. After the war, physicists 
were accustomed to a different relationship between pure and applied 
work. It became perfectly acceptable for even top theoretical physicists 
to work on real-world problems. And equally important, for basic re-
search to be “interesting,” physicists needed to sell their colleagues on 
its possible applications.
du Pont’s nylon project wasn’t the only place where a new research 
culture developed during the 1930s, and the Hanford site and Met Lab 
weren’t the only government labs at which physicists and engineers 
were brought into close contact during World War II. Similar changes 
took place, for similar reasons, at Los Alamos, the naval research 
Lab, the radiation labs at Berkeley and MIt, and in many other places 
around the country as the needs of industry, and then the military, 
forced a change in outlook among physicists. By the end of the war, the 
field had been transformed. no longer could the gentleman-scientist 
of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century labor under the illu-

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sion that his work was above worldly considerations. Physics was now 
too big and too expensive. the wall between pure physics and applied 
physics had been demolished.
Born in 1916, osborne was exceptionally precocious. He finished 
high school at fifteen, but his parents wouldn’t let him attend college 
so young, so he spent a year in prep school — which he hated — be-
fore going on to the University of virginia to major in astrophysics. 
the intellectual independence and broad, innate curiosity that would 
later characterize his scientific career were apparent early on. After his 
first year of college, for instance, osborne decided he’d had enough of 
studying. So one day that summer, after finishing a job at the Mccor-
mick observatory in charlottesville, virginia, he decided to drop out 
of school. Instead of going back to UvA, he would spend some time 
doing physical labor. He told his parents his plan, and apparently they 
knew better than to try to talk him out of it, because they contacted 
a family friend with a farm in West virginia and osborne went there 
to work for the year. But he was sent home for christmas, followed 
shortly by a note from the farm’s owner saying that she had had quite 
enough of him. osborne spent the rest of the year pushing a wheelbar-
row around norfolk, helping the director of physical education for the 
norfolk school district regrade playgrounds. the year of hard labor 
convinced osborne that academic life wasn’t so bad after all. He re-
turned to UvA the following September.
After college, osborne headed west to Berkeley for a graduate pro-
gram in astronomy. there he met and worked closely with luminar-
ies in the physics department, including oppenheimer. this is where 
osborne was when war broke out in europe in 1939. By the spring 
of 1941, many physicists, oppenheimer included, were beginning to 
think about the war effort, including the possible use of nuclear weap-
ons. osborne saw the writing on the wall. recognizing that he would 
likely be drafted, he attempted to enlist — but he was rejected because 
he wore thick glasses (early in the war effort, recruiters could afford 
to be picky). So he sent an application to the nrL, which offered him 
a job in its Sound division. He packed his bags and headed home to 
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t h e p h y s i c s o f wa l l s t r e e t

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